Digital Marketing - unit 2

 

Your window to the digital world

 

I feel I’m able to serve my customer by knowing what she or he wants. One of the ways I’m able to do this is through my website, and email: people give me great ideas, tell me what they want, what they don’t want. It’s really instrumental, and helps me stay in touch with people.

(Kathy Ireland)

 

If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

(Jeff Bezos)

 

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

(Demosthenes, 384–322 BC)

 

This chapter is about

 

l  Why is my website so important?

l  How do I build an effective website?

l  How should I structure the information on my website?

l  What is usability, and why should I care?

 

l  Why are accessibility and web standards important?

l  How do I create compelling web content?

 

 

Your website – the hub of your digital marketing world

If you are a digital marketer, your website is your place of business. You may have all sorts of campaigns out there, tapping the far-flung reaches of cyberspace for a rich vein of new customers, but ultimately everything will be channelled back through a single point: your website. That makes your website incredibly valuable. In fact, it’s the single most valuable piece of digital real estate you’ll ever own. Get your digital marketing strategy right and, who knows, it could well end up being the most valuable piece of real estate you own, period.

 

A conversion engine for traffic

All of the digital marketing techniques we’ll discuss in the coming chapters have one thing in common: they’re designed to drive targeted, pre-qualified traffic to your website. But traffic on its own does nothing but consume internet bandwidth. It’s your website that converts that traffic into prospects and/or customers – taking the numbers and transforming them into something of tangible value to your business.

Yes, you need to provide information about your business, products and services – but always with your conversion goals in mind. Everything on your website should be geared towards achieving those conversion goals,

 

either directly (products and service information, online ordering and sales functionality, sales-focused copy and calls to action, enquiry forms, newsletter sign-up, etc) or indirectly (business and brand information that builds trust, and content that encourages repeat visits and/or establishes your authority or reputation in your field).

Your conversion goals could be anything from an actual online purchase (a sales transaction), to an online query (lead generation), to subscribing for your online newsletter (opt-in for future marketing) – or whatever else you decide is important for your business and appropriate for your customers. You can, of course, have multiple, tiered conversion goals. Your primary goal might be an online sale or booking, your secondary goal could be online lead generation and your tertiary goal could be to harvest e-mails for your opt-in mailing list.

 

Building an effective website

An effective website is essentially about the convergence of two things: your business goals and the needs of your target market. Build something that aligns the two and you’ll end up with an effective website. Broken down like that it sounds simple, but achieving that convergence can be a tricky process – and a quick surf around the web will soon demonstrate that it’s easier to get it wrong than to get it right.

You’ll note we used the word ‘effective’ rather than ‘successful’. For a website to be successful people need to be able to find it (which we’ll cover in the next chapter on search), but if you build your site to cater for the right people’s needs you significantly increase the chance that, once they arrive, they’ll become more than just a passing statistic.

First, let’s state here and now that this isn’t a definitive guide to website development. This is a book about digital marketing. In this chapter we’ll be exploring how to approach your website with digital marketing in mind. Our focus is to maximize the effectiveness of your website with a view to your digital marketing endeavours. What follows is a high-level overview of the important elements to consider when designing your website from a digital marketing perspective. It is not meant to be an exhaustive guide. Most of the topics we touch on here would warrant an entire book to

 

themselves. In fact, if you surf on over to Amazon you’ll find a swath of titles available in each category. You’ll also find an avalanche of relevant (and of course irrelevant) information on the web.

Here, our aim is to arm you with the high-level knowledge you’ll need to make informed decisions about your website design in a digital marketing context and to communicate exactly what you need to your web design partners when it’s time to construct your digital hub.

 

The main steps of building your website

Different businesses will follow different processes involving different groups of people when designing, developing and implementing a website, but regardless of the approach you choose to take, how formal or informal the process, there are a number of key stages that generally form part of any web development project:

 

l  Planning

l  Design

l  Development

l  Testing

l  Deployment

Before you start

Know why you’re building a website

‘What is my website for?’ It’s a simple enough question.

 

 

Know who your website is for

Knowing who exactly you’re creating your website for is also crucial to its success.

 

Build usability and accessibility into your website design

Usability and accessibility are central to good web design – and yet both are frequently ignored, or at least are not given the weighting they warrant when it comes to making design decisions.

 

Usability

 

Accessibility

 

A word about the W3C and web standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, www.w3.org) is the gatekeeper of web standards. Its mission: ‘to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web’.

 

Words make your website tick

The world of the web is dominated by words. Audio, video, flash and animation may seem to be everywhere online but, even in an era where multimedia content seems to be taking over, at its core the web is still all about text and the connections between different words and phrases on and between websites. To a digital marketer, some of those words and phrases are more important than others, and knowing which words are relevant to your business is essential to building an effective website. These are your keywords or key phrases, and in the search-dominated world of the digital marketer they are, in a word, key. Exactly what they are will depend on your business, the digital marketing goals you defined as part of your overall strategy, and the online behaviour of your target market. But you need to know what they are.

Know your competition

Identifying your competition, analysing what they’re trying to achieve with their websites, where they’re succeeding and where they’re failing, can be a great way of getting ideas and looking at different ways you can compete online. Take the keyword phrases you’ve identified for your website and type them into leading search engines. The sites that rank highly for your keywords are your online competition.

Choosing your domain name

Every website on the internet has a unique address (a slight simplification, but we don’t need to get into the complexities here). It’s called an IP address, and it’s not very interesting, informative or memorable to most humans. It consists of a series of numbers something like 64.233.167.99 (type that address into your browser and see where it takes you).

While that’s fine for computers and the occasional numerically inclined tech-head, it’s not much use to the rest of us. So back in the early days of the internet, the domain name system was developed to assign human-readable names to these numeric addresses. These domain names – things like digitalmarketingsuccess.com, google.com, wikipedia. org or harvard.edu – are naturally much more useful and memorable to your average human than the IP addresses they relate to.

 

You need your own domain name

If you don’t have your own domain name, you’re going to need to register one. As a business, if you want to be taken seriously online, piggybacking on someone else’s domain is completely unacceptable. An address like www.mysite.someothersite.com or www.someothersite.com/mysite/ looks unprofessional, makes your web address difficult to remember, won’t do you any favours with search engines and generally tarnishes your business image wherever you publicize it, online and off.

 

Some things to bear in mind when choosing your domain name are:

 

l  Make it catchy, memorable and relevant

l  Use a country-specific top-level domain (TLD)2 to appeal to a local audience:

l  You can buy multiple domain names

l  Keywords in a domain name can be beneficial

Hosting – your website’s home on the internet

The other bit of housekeeping you’ll need to take care of before your site goes live is hosting. Your finished site will consist of files, applications and possibly a database, all of which sit on a computer that’s permanently connected to the internet. This computer is your web server, and will be running special software that will accept requests from users’ web browsers and deliver your web pages by return. It’s a bit more complicated, but basically that’s what it boils down to.

Unless you belong to a large organization with its own data centre that has a permanent connection to the internet backbone, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll host your site in-house. A much more likely scenario is that you’ll arrange a hosting solution through a specialist hosting provider.

 

Different types of hosting

There are basically four different types of hosting offered by web hosting companies, all of which are perfectly acceptable for your business website. Which option you choose will depend largely on your budget, how busy you anticipate your website will be (in terms of visitor traffic), and the amount of control you want over the configuration of the server (whether you need to install your own custom software, change security settings, configure web server options, etc).

NB: A word of warning here: avoid ‘free’ hosting accounts. While they may be tempting for a small business site to begin with, they tend to be unreliable, often serve up annoying ads at the top of your site, don’t offer the flexibility or functionality of a paid hosting account, may not support the use of your own domain name, offer limited (if any) support, and present a greater risk that you’ll be sharing your server with some less-than-desirable neighbours – which can hurt your search engine rankings.

 

  Shared hosting accounts

Virtual dedicated hosting

Dedicated hosting

Server co-location

 

Choosing your hosting company

Your website developer will be able to help you decide which web hosting option is right for you, based on the size, design, functionality and configuration of your website, and your anticipated levels of traffic based on your business goals. The developer should also be able to recommend a reliable web hosting company that will serve your needs.

When choosing your web host bear the following in mind:

 

l  Choose a host in the country where your primary target market lives

l  Make sure the host is reliable

l  Find out what sort of support they offer

l  Back-up and disaster recovery

l  What others think

l  Shop around

How to choose a web designer or developer

         Unless you’re a web designer yourself or have access to a dedicated in- house web development team, you’ll need to bring in a professional web design firm to help you with your website project. You’ll find a host of options out there, offering a range of services that will make your mind boggle. The good news is, if you’ve done your preliminary work, you should already have a fair idea what you want out of your website, who it’s aimed at and the sort of features you’d like to include. Armed with that knowledge, you can start to whittle down the list of potential designers to something more manageable:

 

l  Look at their own website

l  Examine their portfolio

l  Ask their customers for recommendations

l  What’s their online reputation like?

l  Are they designing sites to be found?

l  Do they adhere to web standards?

Arranging your information

          Your site structure – the way you arrange and group your information and how users navigate their way around it – can have a massive impact on its usability, its visibility to search engine spiders, its rank in search engine results pages (SERPs)3 and its potential to convert the traffic once it arrives. Getting your information architecture right is absolutely critical to the success of your website.

It can be difficult to know where to start. You know what information you want on your site, but what’s the best way of arranging it so that users can access it intuitively, at the level of granularity they desire, while also providing you with maximum exposure in the search engines for specific keywords? The answer, as is so often the case in digital marketing, is that it depends. It depends on the sort of business you’re in, the type of site you’re building, your target audience, your business goals and a whole host of other variables.

 

Start with your keywords

The keywords your potential users are searching on should give you a good indication of both the content they’re looking for and the search terms you want your site to rank for in the SERPs. Take those keywords and arrange them into logical categories or themes. These themes, along with the staple ‘Home page’, ‘About us’ and ‘Contact us’ links, give you the primary navigation structure for your site.

 

Define your content structure

Look at your main themes, the keywords you’ve associated with each of them and the corresponding information or content  you  want  to include beneath each. Now define a tiered hierarchy of sub-categories (your secondary, tertiary, etc navigation levels) within each theme as necessary until you have all of your targeted keywords covered. Arrange your content so that the most important information is summarized at

 

 

 

 

 

 

Section/theme

 

 

 

 

Section/theme Section/theme

Content item

Content item Content item Content item Content item Content item

Content item Content item Content item Content item

 

Sub-category Content item

Content item

Section/theme

Content item

Content item

 

Figure 3.1    A simple website information hierarchy

 

the highest levels, allowing the user to drill down to more detailed but less important information on the specific topic as required. Try not to go too deep in terms of navigation sub-categories – it is rarely necessary to go beyond three, in exceptional cases four, levels deep from the home page.

 

Your home page

The home page is often perceived as one of the most important pages on your site, but is potentially one of the least useful, both to your business and to your site visitors. For a start, home pages tend, by necessity, to be relatively generic: too generic to answer a user’s specific query or to entice instantly the conversion you crave. Indeed, many of your visitors

–  especially those arriving from a search engine or by clicking on a link from another website or an online advertisement – will tend to land on a much more focused internal page, one that deals with the specific topic that they’ve searched for or clicked on. This deeper page should be much better at satisfying their immediate requirements.

Where a home page comes into its own is as a central reference point for navigating your content. A breadcrumb trail or navigation path along the top of your site can tell users at a glance exactly where they are on your site in relation to a fixed point: your home page. It’s also a convenient central location that users can easily return to. No matter where they wander on your site users are always only one click from home, which reassures them that they can’t get lost.

Your home page should be a ‘jumping-off point’ for the rest of your site, offering intuitive navigation to all of your main sections or themes, and telling people immediately what your site is all about and how it can help them. It’s also a good place to highlight new products and services, special offers, incentives, news or anything else you want to promote on your site.

Avoid splash screens that simply show your company logo and a ‘Click here to enter’ button. They offer no benefit at all to your users or to your business – they are web clutter at its worst. Likewise flash intros – the ‘Skip intro’ button is one of the most widely clicked buttons on the web. Remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to achieve their goals, so avoid putting obstacles between them and your real content.

 

Writing effective web content

Now you’ve defined a structure for your information you’re ready to put together your content. Stop! Don’t make the mistake that often happens with new websites. You can’t simply take your offline marketing collateral and paste the same copy into your web pages and expect it to work.

The golden rule of writing effectively in any medium is to know your audience – the more your writing is tailored to your audience, the more effective it is. It’s exactly the same on the web. The difference between effective web writing and effective print writing reflects the core difference in the nature of the audience. Print is a linear medium; the web is random access. People read through printed material from beginning to end; on the web they scan and skip. Offline readers are patient; online readers want the information they’re looking for now, now, now.

We already know a bit about the characteristics of online users from our look at online consumer behaviour in the last chapter – writing effective web content is about taking what we know about web users in general, and the target audience of our website in particular, and applying that knowledge to deliver our information in a format that meets those readers’ needs:

 

l  Grab attention

l  Make it scannable

l  Make it original

l  Use the inverted pyramid

l  Be consistent

l  Engage with your readerTop ten mistakes in web design

Jakob Nielsen

Since my first attempt in 1996, I have compiled many top-10 lists of the biggest mistakes in web design. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of web design.

 

1.   Bad search

2.   PDF files for online reading

3.   Not changing the colour of visited links

4.  Non-scannable text

l  subheads;

l  bulleted lists;

l  highlighted keywords;

l  short paragraphs;

l  the inverted pyramid;

l  a simple writing style; and

l  de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.

 

5.  Fixed font size

6.  Page titles with low search engine visibility

7.   Anything that looks like an advertisement

l  banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page;

l  animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations;

l  pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up ‘windoids’ before they have even fully rendered, sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph).

 

8.  Violating design conventions

9.  Opening new browser windows

10.   Not answering users’ questions

 

Website design summary

l  Establish clear business goals for your website right from the start

l  Know your target audience

l  Know your competitionUse a professional web designer

l  Professional look and feel

l  Follow standards

l  Keep it simple

l  Design to be found

l  Content written for the web

l  Test everything

l  Hold the initial marketing blitz